Type 2 Action Hub

The Sheffield Action Hub is a project that aims to help people living in and members of communities which are not getting the same opportunities to be healthy as others.

The Action Hub is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund’s Health Equalities programme, which has awarded £6.9 million to support local areas to develop effective and sustainable partnerships between the voluntary and community sector, the NHS and local authorities to improve health and wellbeing, reduce health inequalities and empower communities. 

Voluntary Action Sheffield brought together a range of community health projects, Sheffield Diabetes UK Group, Sheffield City Council and the regional Integrated Health Service (ICB). The hub brings together lots of different people to work on helping people live well with Type 2 Diabetes, help people avoid Type 2 Diabetes, contribute to developing knowledge in communities, and influence and address issues that contribute to the incidence of Type 2 diabetes. A key method adopted by the Action Hub is ensuring everyone can have a say and be involved in finding solutions.

The hub partners are also going to try to make sure that everyone has access to the resources they need to stay healthy.

We will do this by listening to what people have to say, by using evidence to make decisions, and by treating everyone with kindness and respect.

We believe that everyone has something to offer and that everyone can be a part of making things better.

We are all working hard to find ways to reduce health inequalities and make sure that everyone has a chance to be healthy.

The Action Hub offers different things to help people.

It’s:

·        a place where everyone can come together and talk about what is needed to make things better.

·        where people work together to come up with ideas and solutions to improve health and wellbeing.

·        a chance to help people to identify and act on opportunities for change in existing services or ways of working.

·        Working together to find out what works and how to use them best to help people.

·        has a list of services, information, and resources that people can use if they need help.

·        a way to help people who want to be volunteers or who want to learn new skills to help others.

We believe that by working together, everyone can make a difference and help make things better.

The project has a budget of £400,000 and a wealth of expertise and knowledge from the partners involved. We will be working on this until the end of 2025 and looking at how the work and support will continue afterwards.

A key aim has been to defeat Type 2 so that Sheffield becomes a city so healthy that avoidable Type 2 is avoided.

Get in touch with Adam Batty (a.batty@vas.org.uk) for more info on how to get involved.



All you need to know about the Diabetes Action Hub work, and where to find it

What is the purpose of this work?

To develop sustainable and effective cross-sector ways of working to reduce health inequalities and improve health and wellbeing, starting with type II diabetes.

Why do this work?

There are drastic differences in the length and quality of people’s lives in different communities across Sheffield. There is an opportunity to work together as a partnership, use our collective strengths, and find new ways of working which can reduce these inequalities and create sustainable change.

We know we can make a difference by working with groups of people who are most underserved by existing services. A basic/draft report on this here. 

We can develop new ways of working that will lead to sustainable change if we do this together as equal partners from different sectors and organisations.

How will we do it?

The 5 workstreams we have agreed to follow during this work, and the first aims of each workstream to act as a way of getting things started - some have volunteer leads, some are up for grabs.